Tag: Luis Miranda

He’s
the biggest name on Broadway in a generation, and one of
the most admired multi-hyphenates in show business since
Orson Welles. He’s also an activist. The composer,
lyricist, librettist, and star of Hamilton, the hottest
ticket on the Great White Way in recent years, Lin-Manuel
Miranda has supported a number of the left-wing causes to
which famous performers are inclined to flock.

Oscar López Rivera

But
so be it. That’s nothing unusual. What is
rather
special, as David Hines noted in a December article
for The
Federalist, is
that Miranda is “an avid supporter of the Puerto Rican
nationalist terrorist Oscar López Rivera, ringleader of the
1970s terrorist group FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación
Nacional Puertorriqueña / Armed Forces of Puerto Rican
National Liberation), which murdered at least five and
probably six innocent New Yorkers.” There is no decent way
of defending their action. López and his followers were
not just Puerto Rican nationalists; they were Communists who
wanted to free Puerto Rico in order to turn it into a
carbon copy of Castro’s Cuba.

Bill de Blasio

López
was sentenced to 55 years in prison, only to be released
by President Obama at the end of his presidency in late
2016. López went on to be celebrated as a hero. He was,
as we noted at this website, honored at last year’s
Puerto Rican Day parade, an action that led several
politicians and corporate sponsors of the parade to back
out, along with many ordinary Puerto Ricans who were
appalled at the apparent hijacking of their day, and their
event, by supporters of Communist terrorism. Mayor Bill de
Blasio, however, marched in the parade as scheduled.

How
did López come to be the hero of last year’s parade?
Among the top figures behind this disgraceful action were
New York City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and her
aide Luis Miranda. And who is Luis Miranda? None other than
the father of Mr. Broadway himself.

Fraunces Tavern

And
how does Lin-Manuel Miranda feel about López? When the
terrorist was released from prison, Miranda, who at the time
had more than a million Twitter followers, hailed his
freedom with a tweet in which he referred to López
respectfully as “Don Oscar.” He also gave him a ticket
to Hamilton and escorted him to the performance. As
Hines wrote, wryly: “It turns out that there’s actually
an answer to the question ‘Who do you have to kill to
get a ticket to “Hamilton?”’ and the answer is ‘Harold
Sherburne, Frank Connor, James Gezork, Alejandro Berger, and
Charles Steinberg.’”

The
first four names are those of the innocent people whom
López and his crew killed in a bombing at New York’s
legendary Fraunces Tavern on January 24, 1975; the fifth,
Steinberg, died in another bombing two years later.

That
wasn’t all. As Hines pointed out, in this era when a
slip of a tongue can destroy a showbiz career, Miranda, who
has continued to post tweets in support of López, and who
now has more than 2.5 million Twitter followers, has never
suffered any unpleasant consequences as a result. On December
19, his latest film, Mary Poppins Returns, opened.
When big-budget motion pictures have their premieres, the
stars are subjected to endless hours of interviews by
entertainment journalists. As far as we know, not a single
one of them has asked Miranda about his support for “Don
Oscar.”

It was enjoyable to read New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s livid charge that the defection of sponsors from the Big Apple’s forthcoming Puerto Rican Day Parade – in response to her announcement that the parade would be honoring terrorist murderer Oscar López Rivera – had been “orchestrated” by those “ultra right-wing” types who want Puerto Rico to be a state, not a separate country. (Lopez’s cause, as we’ve previously noted, was and is Puerto Rican independence, Castro style.) Never mind that, as the New York Post pointed out, that “ultra right-wing” fringe of statehood supporters consists of about 70 percent of the island’s population. (Coincidentally, voters in Puerto Rico will have their next chance to vote on their island’s status on June 11, the same day their cousins in New York are marching down Fifth Avenue.) Mark-Viverito continued to insist that López is a “freedom fighter” and former “prisoner of war” and maintained her refusal to say anything sympathetic for those killed and wounded in acts of FALN terrorism.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio

Unsurprisingly, Mayor Bill de Blasio – the kind of far-left politician who is reflexively sympathetic to terrorists like López – still plans to march with the murderer.

Yet as Caroll Alvarado wrote in the Post, also on May 27, many Puerto Ricans in New York have decided to give the mayor the bird and join Jet Blue, Goya, and Univision in boycotting the parade. “I’m as Puerto Rican as it gets, but I can’t support the parade this year,” Angi Silva told Alvarado. “We should be focusing on helping our island, not honoring a criminal.” Jaida Selvenajnole agreed, noting that López “went to jail for a reason.” And Zoraida Vega, calling López a “criminal,” said: “He was in jail for 35 years. Why are we honoring him?…The mayor shouldn’t be going. It doesn’t look right.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton

For Mark-Viverito aide Luis Miranda – who happens to be the father of Broadway darling Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) – these critics of López are nothing but a bunch of “Trump/right-winger Latinos.” The New York Times, in a May 29 story about the controversy, managed to find Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans living in New York) on both sides of the issue.

Budet and his banner

Among those in the pro-López camp was Smokey Escobar, age 62, who provided this cryptic comment: “Why not? He earned it, in his way.” Then there was Ricardo Gabriel, whom the paper identified as a 36-year-old “doctoral candidate writing about Puerto Rican activists at the City University of New York.” Gabriel was described as seeing “a silver lining” in the decision of all those corporate sponsors to back out: “The parade has been dominated by corporate sponsors, and I felt like it wasn’t authentic anymore,” he said. “But now, with Goya and others pulling out, I think this is a step in the right direction.” In other words, better a murderer than a corporation. Terrorism may be bad, but capitalism is worse. (Apparently all those years of grad school have really paid off for Mr. Gabriel.) The Times also ran a picture of Puerto Rican artist Osvaldo Budet “hanging a banner in support of Oscar López Rivera at El Puente community center in Brooklyn,” an institution that (to judge by its website) has close and complicated ties to the New York City Board of Education, among other municipal agencies. We wondered how much New York taxpayer money goes every year to this organization that stands with a man who was responsible for the cold-blooded murder of New York taxpayers.